No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
by Rian Takkesin
Summary: Her curiosity got the better of her and now she is in somthing much too deep for her to figure out. Emma must learn about the dark this world holds while trying to live. She has to protect the seal. OC story with the boys and angels thrown in the mix.


No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Chapter One

Emma gaunt was lively as could be expected to be as she started her slow trek back to her house. Her backpack was heavy and the straps cut into her shoulders as her feet carried her toward the corner. From there she would turn right on Old maple road where the view of her high school would be blocked by run-down apartment building and warehouses that were near the point of dilapidation. The sun, having outlived its tenure, slid even closer to the horizon where it sloshed pink, orange, and lilac hues on the remaining clouds. The receding light cast her shadow in one long deformed line that reached far ahead of her. The cracks and bubbles on the street distorted the shadow even more.

She sighed in exasperation as she readjusted her backpack. Her parents would be gone again tonight. It was not very uncommon considering that one was a congresswoman and the other was a lawyer, and they were both workalcholics. There love for work was one of the few things that they had in common. Emma had no driving urge to end up like them: in a loveless marriage, working until she dropped, with a nice but relatively empty house. She to have a job that helped people: preferably something not involved in politics. She loved her parents, but hoped with all of her might that something would change, someone would give, and they would end up in a nice, loving, supportive relationship.

The sun was nearly gone now. Emma looked away from her feet to admire the last rays of sun as the sky deepened and darkened in color. It was beautiful. This time of day, when she would begin the slow amble from school to her home, was her favorite. The quiet was peaceful and not hollow like it was at her house. It gave her room to breathe and think and be. Sometimes, it was lonely. So lonely that she would envision footsteps beside hers, in sync with each step she took and the soft thump as her tennis shoes hit the pavement. Once and awhile, she would extend her imagination to encompass her invisible companion's breathing. However, today she did not feel the need to have someone with her. She wanted to feel alone.

As the last dregs of sunlight faded into the sky, Emma reached her house. It was a quiet, modern house, with bright white siding and a small maple tree in the front yard. As fall had just ended and winter was just beginning to yawn, the most of the leaves from the tree had fallen, leaving it bare and cold. According to her routine, she paused at the mailbox, lifted the lid, and removed the letters. As she shuffled through the mail, she walked around the house to a gate set in the white vinyl fence that encompassed the property. Emma tucked the mail, which did not contain anything for her, under her left arm as she undid the latch with her right. There she sidetracked through the garage and into the house.

Her mother had left the decorating of the house up to her father; he instead gave Emma a budget and allowed her to make all of the decisions about flooring, paint, accessories, and furniture. She did the best she could, but her creative juices ran short. So each room in the house was monochromatic. The kitchen was brown, the dining room was pale orange, and the short hallway connecting the two was brown and pale orange. She bypassed each of these rooms after setting all of the mail, in sorted piles, one for her father and one for her mother, on the coffee table and headed straight for her bedroom. Her backpack was quickly discarded and she breathed.

Emma looked up at her ceiling and made the decision that she didn't want to be stuck in the house, with just her unfinished homework, as company. Retracing her steps to the kitchen, she agitatedly clicked the button on the answering machine and listened to it as each of her parents gave their excuses and said that they wouldn't be back until the weekend, at the earliest. Her father had the decency to say that he loved her and was sorry that he couldn't be home but…It made little difference. Emma grabbed her coat, which had been discarded out in the garage and walked back outside with little intention of returning until much later.

The sun was gone now, and the early stages of night manifested themselves with the faint glowing of light from her porch light. The air was a tad bit cooler, and she breathed it in with vigor. She walked back the way she came. The road, with all of its potholes, was familiar to her that she was in little danger of tripping. Emma looked up at the sky and wished that she could see the stars, but the streetlamps were shedding so much light that the waking beams of the stars were drowned out by their artificial glow. She continued to walk that same path from the high school to her house nearly three times before the enjoyment ceased.

The night was still early when she rounded the corner and paused in bewilderment. The once brightly lit Old Maple Road was cast into darkness; it was as if each streetlamp had determined that they no longer wanted to shed light and just stopped. Its dilapidated buildings did not look so charming any more. They were eerie. A small silver car, which had not been there the last time Emma had walked this street, was parked on the side of the road. Emma approached it with caution, trepidation, as she knew of no one with honorable intentions who would have any desire to come here, at night.

As she reached the car and was about to place her hand on its exterior, voices muffled and seething, drifted to her from a door on the side of the warehouse. The door was open slightly and a small sliver of light glowed yellow and foreign in comparison to all of the boarded up windows and its brooding companions. Emma flinched badly. Her breath caught in her throat and she froze. Once her brain determined that she was not in any immediate danger and the voices were indiscernible. She turned on her heel and started to walk away from the car. After getting fifty yards away, Emma could no longer squelch the brimming curiosity. Visions of grandeur, of catching the criminals and helping an ongoing investigation, swam, tantalizing, in front of her. With wariness, she turned back to the lighted doorway and made a decision to turn back and see what the heck was going on.

The door knob was cool against her fingers as she gently gripped it. Her other hand was flat on the wood of the door and she prayed that it wouldn't squeak. By minute increments, Emma pulled at the door. Once she had enough room to silently squeeze through she was assaulted with the morbid stench of sulfur, rotting flesh, and damp mold. Resisting the strong urge to gag, she glanced to the right and ducked behind some crates. The voices were chanting something in a harsh language that sounded rough, uncultured, and disturbing. As not to make any noise she shuffled to right further into the warehouse. The light flickered as a small breeze brought the heavy smells to start her dry-heaving. Emma stopped and placed her head on the concrete floor and calmed herself enough to continue her journey to the source of the light and subsequently the smell. Soon she was army crawling behind more crates, adjacent with them. The only sounds were their bizarre chanting and the sound of her own seemingly harsh breaths.

Emma was surprised to discover that the light was from many candles that flickered and danced as they were placed in a spiral all around a cloth covered central table. Six people were chanting with unbounded gusto. Faces were drawn up into masks of unabashed predatory smirks of glee. Acrossed the room, almost ten yards away, a chain dangled with a rotting, bloody carcass attached. Emma stared in horror. It wasn't a dead animal. Its face had been lacerated so many times that it was impossible to tell who it was originally. Two feet away from it, tools of torture laid discarded and bloody on a canvas tarp. Many of those tools, Emma didn't recognize. The one's she did drew up her stomach into a hard knot at the base of her diaphragm.

A change in the tempo of the chanting wrenched her eyes away from the appalling scene and she glared at the six twisted beings. They couldn't be human. Emma didn't see what was on the table, but she knew that it would most likely be as bad if not worse then what was hanging on that chain. They looked normal, these monsters, like someone you would see on the bus or a college of her parents. One was fat and balding, another appeared to be a normal soccer mom, but the two things that were different were their smirks and their coal black eyes. Humans didn't have depthless black eyes that swallowed up the flickering light of the candles with obvious thirst. The six raised their hands around the table and the smell of sulfur ladened the air.

The candles flared upward arcing toward the ceiling like fingertips from hell. Their streams of fire encircled the six in a protective circle of six foot high flames fueled by pure evil. The people in the middle started to laugh. At first Emma mistook the noise for gagging or choking. However, the demons were chortling with blatant glee and excitement. From what she could see through the bars of fire, all of their faces were smirking with wide expectation. Slowly very slowly a dark smoke oozed from the center of the table. It was like it was forcing itself through a filter that was much to fine. But it kept up its slow seeping into this world. Emma watched, transfixed. All too soon, the _thing_ was finished. It billowed like a gigantic cloud over the table and the six faces that beamed at it in exaltation.

Emma shuddered with pure revoltion. This was not right. She never believed that people actually did _Satanic _things such as this. Reverently, one of the poor possessed people reached out with a sword. It was a practical looking sword, with no sharp curved edges and strange carvings. It was out of place; it did not fit the norm for a terrible ritual. The smoke, ominous and billowing curled lovingly around the blade as if it was a lover caressing the face of its beloved. Pale lavender light glowed just above the demon and strengthened steadily. Within the space of fifteen seconds, the light was so bright that Emma could no longer look at it. Then just as quickly and with no apparent cause the light above the sword and the candles to flare into non existence.

The room was pitch black; Emma flinched. She snuggled even closer to the cold concrete beneath her as if it was a source of comfort in the unsuspected darkness. However, her stare returned to the direction of the table and waited for her vision to adjust. Slowly as if a film was being peeled away from her eyes, shapes in the darkness started to emerge. Emma was surprised to see that the six persons that had been standing around the table were no longer there. They were all on the floor with eyes and mouth gaping with astonished pain. She squinted at them and with horror, realized that their chests were no longer moving up and down with breath. Blood seeped from their noses.

The door from where she entered opened and the soft glow of streetlamps illuminated several figures. Methodically they approached the table. The sword was sitting on the table, a mock innocence in the middle of six grotesque dead people all around it. There were two of them, both male and sober looking. One was tall with dark skin. The grimace on his face was apparent in the dim light. He regarded the six bodies with apparent distaste.

"Castiel, how do we know that the demons haven't already broken the seal?" He inquired to his partner as he nudged a body of a middle aged man with his foot.

The one that he called Castiel didn't respond to the question. Instead, his piercing blue gaze was trained in her direction. Emma stopped breathing. The light in the room was not great enough for him to discover her hiding place. There barely was enough light for her to see his profile and that of his partner. He was shorter than the other by at least a foot. Concern and puzzlement drew his eyebrows together in deep furrows in his forehead. A rumpled suit accompanied by an equally worn tan trench coat made him seem like an accountant or an underpaid realtor. He appeared sacred somehow, holy almost, but Emma still did not feel safe.

"We must have Faith in all things, Uriel." his eventual response was.

His voice was deeper than Emma expected. However, it wasn't unpleasant. There was an undertone that she could not make out. Was it a warning or wariness? She did not have time to complete her evaluation. With the same methodical steps that he walked in the warehouse with, Castiel approached her hiding place. Uriel, who had been grumbling unmistakably underneath his breath had ceased suddenly as he realized that his partner was onto something. Emma glanced to the right. Nearly ten feet away the row of boxes ended. As silently as she could she squirmed toward it and the promise darkness it afforded. It was all for nothing.

The candles flared upward, bursting to life like a phoenix rising from hell. Castiel and Uriel both spun to face the altar and the sword that laid there innocently. Emma raised her head up to peep through the curtain of flames and smoldering ash. The carcass, morbid and completely forgotten until it let out a piercing scream as black smoke poured into its broken container. It wrenched its self off the chains and hooks and stood on the floor with broken legs. It wasn't possible. Black smoke animated a corpse like a beaten puppet that was bending in ways that could in no way be real. His face contorted by deep, rotten, oozing, slashes was perpendicular with his neck and he chuckled a bit before approaching the alter that held the sword.

Uriel ordered the corpse with a strong command that bespoke of barely leashed anger and wrath. It made a clicking noise in the back of its throat like it was grinding its vertebrae together so that it could minutely shake its head. The foul stench of decay wafted over to Emma.

"Caim cease now or we will lay you to waste." Ureil charged again. The horrid clicking intensified.

Emma came to a very simple realization. She was going to die tonight whether she wanted to or not. If the marinated clicking demon thing discovered her then she might end up decorated with multiple deep wounds and every bone splintered in her body. If the others caught her then she might end up worse. Emma eyed the three as they circled each other like wolves waiting for the right moment to pounce. Gradually she inched to the door and the promise of soft streetlamp outside.

However, the thought of the sword and the lavender light that consumed killed all of those poor possessed people halted her progress. Ignoring her immediate qualms about staying, Emma decided that she was going to take the sword away so that either side would not have the opportunity to use its powers.

The three were dancing in this strange fight with a lot of punches and throwing. Emma didn't think. She darted through the fray, took the cloth covering the table, wrapped it around the sword, and ran as if the devil himself was chasing her. The clicking followed her as she jumped into the silver car. Panicked, she turned the key into the ignition just as the corpse raised a misshapen hand to the door handle. She threw the car into drive and stomped on the gas. It wrenched the clinging hand away from its body and left clotted blood all over her window.

Emma was crying with great heaving sobs of pure fear. All she could think about was how fast the clicking monster moved. _Caim_ her brain supplied. _Its name is Caim. It's a demon_. Minutely her breath ceased its sharp gasps.

She drove without direction.

"I can't just lead them home." She reasoned "I'll drive around a while, get hopelessly lost, but keep moving. Dump this car, and walk back to my house. There I can hole up for a few days and figure out how to destroy this thing."

The sound of her voice so practical in the car was enough for her to calm down enough to stop her blood from pounding quite so hard.


End file.
